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What a bank-client relationship looks like when banks control the data behind the UX

The relationship between clients and banks has been structured around a destination model, where businesses log in, navigate dashboards, export data, and piece together insights.

Grasshopper is working to dismantle that model.

In August 2025, the digital bank launched its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in partnership with enterprise-grade digital banking solutions provider Narmi to address a specific challenge: enabling clients to use modern AI tools with their financial data without compromising banking security and control standards.

Nate Gruendemann, Director of Product at Grasshopper

“We learned people were uploading their bank statements or transaction files to their [external] AI of choice to run AI-analysis on their finances,” says Nate Gruendemann, Director of Product at Grasshopper. “MCP technology is how we close that gap.”

Technically, MCP sits between Grasshopper’s core banking systems and external AI models, managing authentication, permissions, and data structuring before any client-specific bank data reaches the AI model (e.g., Claude or ChatGPT). 

“In practice, this allows us to expose meaningful financial context while keeping the core banking system insulated,” notes Gruendemann.

But the key design choice lies in what MCP doesn’t allow. The system is built on the assumption that AI models are untrusted environments. MCP is fully opt-in, which means clients must authorize Claude or ChatGPT and authenticate with their banking credentials. The server can see only the data the user is permitted to access, and the entire system is currently read-only. This means AI tools and platforms can analyze information, but cannot act on it independently. For example, they cannot initiate transactions or modify account data.

“We secure the banking infrastructure and access layer, while clients maintain control over how they use their chosen AI tools,” adds Gruendemann.

This indicates Grasshopper isn’t focused on owning the user experience, but on controlling the underlying data layer that powers it.

The rationale behind building a user-facing layer outside the core banking system

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In the world of Stripe: Acquisitions, agentic AI, and stablecoins

Stripe has spent the last decade building itself into the backbone of the internet economy. In this piece, we breakdown its most recent moves to track just how deep Stripe’s role could go in the payments space in the future.

PayPal + Stripe?

Reports suggest that Stripe is considering a PayPal acquisition, although negotiations on the subject are in early stages with no guarantee of going through.

In the background of this acquisition news is Stripe’s growth: The firm announced that it was making a tender offer to employees to sell their stock which valued the company at $159 billion, a 74% increase from its valuation last year.

For Stripe, a PayPal acquisition has quite a few advantages:

A pre-made on-ramp to consumers: PayPal currently has 439 million active consumer and merchant accounts along with digital wallet capabilities and brand recognition with Venmo.

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Why fintechs are transitioning from partners to principals in banking

Fintech’s core value proposition was that financial services could be delivered without owning a bank charter. That model produced an entire generation of financial companies. But it also created a structural dependency: fintechs could innovate quickly and focus on software, distribution, and user experience, yet the underlying regulatory authority, lending licenses, deposit insurance, and access to the financial system, remained largely with partner banks.

By early 2026, signs of a shift in that architecture have started to emerge. Within the last three months, three prominent fintechs have applied for bank charters. Buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm applied to establish a bank subsidiary, followed by cross-border payments platform Payoneer, which filed for a national trust bank to support stablecoin infrastructure. And this month, AI lending platform Upstart applied to become a national bank.

One quarter, three charters

These charter applications are fueled by different objectives.

Affirm: Owning the lending stack

In January, Affirm applied to establish Affirm Bank, a Nevada-chartered industrial loan company regulated by state authorities and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Industrial loan companies (ILCs) can be owned by commercial companies while still operating as FDIC-insured banks, allowing non-bank firms to enter banking without becoming traditional bank holding companies.

For Affirm, the charter could change the economics and structure of its lending platform. The firm can reduce reliance on partners and take greater control over the credit lifecycle, better manage funding costs, expand the scope of its products, and align underwriting, funding, and servicing under a single roof.

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The Quarterly Review: Wise’s Scott Viohl wins audiences through humor and creator-led marketing

 
 

In this edition we will check back in with Scott Viohl, Regional Marketing Lead for North America, at Wise.

 

Executive summary

When we last checked in with Viohl, he was focused on deepening the firm’s presence in the region and analyzing its campaigns to sharpen future efforts.

Over the past four months, his priorities have centered on scaling Wise’s North American footprint, refining how the team measures campaign performance, and pushing creative boundaries through a new wave of creator-led advertising.

Here is what Viohl accomplished:

  • Scaled Wise’s North American brand presence through its biggest-ever TV campaign, reaching over 80% of adults in key US markets and over 60% in target Canadian regions, while delivering double-digit lifts in brand awareness and measurable growth in new customers and transactions.

  • Launched a creator-led campaign built around the bespoke fictional character “Don T. Overpay,” proving that native, entertainment-first content can drive stronger organic engagement than traditional product-focused advertising.

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Coinbase rides the waves of stress and opportunity with its ‘Everything Exchange’ vision

    Coinbase is trying to bridge two financial worlds: crypto and traditional finance, while navigating the challenges of public policy.

    Coinbase [NASDAQ: COIN] is outgrowing its early role as a simple crypto exchange.

    Recent moves suggest that the firm is evolving into a unified platform for multiple financial assets and services, positioning itself as a bridge between traditional finance and the digital asset economy. This transformation is guided by what the company calls its “Everything Exchange” strategy – a term it began emphasizing in late 2025 – aimed at removing boundaries between asset classes and offering trading, financial services, and developer infrastructure within a single integrated platform.

    “Our Everything Exchange vision is about removing artificial boundaries between asset classes and building for the next generation of markets,” the company noted in its recent press release.

    But broadening that scope also exposes Coinbase to new regulatory, competitive, and market pressures: the balancing acts that come with trying to be more than a crypto exchange.

    Everything Exchange comes to life

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    How embedded BNPL optimizes cash flow for SMBs: Inside the Intuit-Affirm partnership

    For years, fintech competed by building better products. Now it’s competing for something more valuable: control of the moment when a financial decision is made.

    The recent Intuit-Affirm partnership offers a clear window into this shift. By embedding Affirm’s pay-over-time directly into QuickBooks invoices, the companies are transforming the accounting software into a decision layer, enabling financial actions directly within the workflow.

    Intuit’s QuickBooks as a platform for action

    Intuit has been transforming itself from a bookkeeping and tax software company into a full-spectrum financial operating system for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Through strategic acquisitions like GoCo, which adds HR and compliance capabilities, and Deserve, which brings mobile-first credit card infrastructure, Intuit has expanded its platform beyond ledgers and payroll into a broader ecosystem. These moves have allowed the company to embed financial services directly into workflows, creating a sticky, end-to-end environment that SMBs rely on to run their businesses.

    The Affirm partnership represents the next stage in this strategy’s evolution.

    “We’re continuously evolving our overall Intuit platform to provide businesses and consumers with a seamless way to manage their money and fuel their financial success,” said David Hahn, Executive Vice President and GM of Intuit’s Services Group.

    “The fintech solutions we’ve embedded in QuickBooks are a key part of this strategy, and adding Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) capabilities through our partnership with Affirm is a natural progression of the work we’ve done to provide businesses with a solution that allows them to view, manage, and take action on their finances in one central place,” he added.

    David Hahn, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Services Group at Intuit

    Embedded directly into QuickBooks Payments, Affirm allows QuickBooks customers to split an invoice into installments while the business gets paid upfront. For small businesses, that difference is critical: they can optimize cash flow and sales as they happen.

    Owning the “Moment of Decision”

    QuickBooks acts as both the distribution layer and the decision point when an invoice is issued.

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    Citizens’ CIO on the ethos that led the bank into the cloud and beyond

    Not all banks are stuck in the mainframe era.

    Today, we look at Citizens, which has been on an impressive modernization and innovation journey, speaking with the bank’s Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services, Michael Ruttledge, to understand how one of America’s oldest institutions shed the weight of legacy technology, moved entirely to the cloud, and built the organizational ethos to carry its progress forward.

    The start of the road

    Citizens was once owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which divested its stake in 2015. Ruttledge, who joined the firm in 2019, was coming into an organization already in the process of modernizing. “When I joined it was a good time because people started to move more applications to the cloud and more were moving into agile development,” he said.

    Since his joining, the firm has been focused on its “Next Gen Technology” initiative that focuses on 5 main pillars and serves as the spine for its modernization efforts:

    1. Empowering the development cycle: Move into an agile environment through developing DevSecOps tools and test automation.

    2. Enhancing communication within the infrastructure: Leverage APIs to modernize the technology stack.

    3. Improving internal capabilities and talent: Upskilling the current workforce because the bank had previously skewed towards outsourcing and developed considerable technical debt within the team.

    4. Transitioning away from mainframes: Moving the infrastructure to the cloud and remote servers.

    5. Fortifying the core: Protecting its core banking software by enhancing stability and security against cyber threats.

    For a firm that was established in 1828, and (in Ruttledge’s words) the “last company on the planet to be using IBM Big Insights,” the Next Gen Technology initiative has been able to realize big results: “We’re the only super regional bank that is completely in the cloud. All of our business apps are either in the Azure or AWS public clouds and we are now in the process of decommitting our data centers in North Carolina,” he shared.

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    Banking: AI, automation, and the rise of digital-first scale

      The new battleground in banking is intelligent operations and scalable execution.

      In 2026, banking is about moving money smarter, faster, and with fewer humans in the middle. Across corporate finance and global retail operations, banks are experimenting with technology and operational design in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about scale, speed, and control. 

      Three recent developments exemplify what’s happening in money movement: Goldman Sachs deploying AI agents, Truist automating corporate receivables, and Nubank expanding abroad with a lean digital model. All demonstrate how the modern banking playbook is evolving.

      Case Analysis 1: Goldman Sachs’ AI agents as “digital colleagues”

      Goldman Sachs is testing a new frontier in operational finance: it’s deploying autonomous AI agents built on Anthropic’s Claude mode to enhance internal productivity and streamline workflows. These agents are undergoing trials for rule-based tasks such as transaction reconciliation, trade accounting, and client onboarding; roles that have resisted automation for decades because of high regulatory and operational complexity.

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      Open banking’s paywall era – and what it means for banks, fintechs, and policy in 2026

      J.P. Morgan processes nearly 2 billion API requests every month, but only about 13% correspond to direct, customer-initiated actions. The rest are background data calls powering budgeting apps, lending tools, and account connections across the fintech ecosystem.

      For years, that access was largely free. But financial innovation seldom arrives in a straight line. Sometimes it swerves unexpectedly, forcing the industry to confront the tension between idealism and economics.

      In 2025, the era of free access took a hit. J.P. Morgan started negotiating paid data-access agreements with third-party data aggregators like Plaid, MX, and Yodlee, signaling a broader shift in the economics of open banking.

      For more than a decade, open banking ran on an implicit bargain: consumers could share their data freely, fintechs could innovate on top of it, and banks would absorb the infrastructure costs. Now, as data volumes surge and regulatory uncertainty lingers, the industry is confronting a harder question: If access to financial data becomes a commercial service, what does “open” banking really mean – and who ultimately foots the bill?

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      Affirm’s move to become a bank signals a reconfiguration for the BaaS industry and beyond

      It’s an interesting time for fintechs, despite regulatory uncertainties like the open banking ruling, that call infrastructural configurations into question. Fintechs like Affirm are also eyeing some greenfield opportunities like becoming a bank. 

      The charter rush

      Getting a US bank charter isn’t easy. But the rising number of charter applications indicates that multiple major players in the industry perceive Trump’s second term in the White House as the right time to push for the elusive bank status. 

      Charter application activity has surged notably under the current administration. Just the first eight months of 2025 produced 21 applications – more than twice the total from the entirety of 2024, which saw only 8.